Tips & Tricks for Search Engine Optimization

The naming of the page

This one may sound a bit silly but the file name of your
page can have an impact on rankings. Believe it or not, many
search engines actually parse out the file name of the page
and log any discernable keywords they find. So, if your
page's URL address is something cryptic like
"http://www.mydomain.com/pageset1/subset35/az-0982.html"
then search engines are not picking up on anything useful in
the URL. If at all possible it is best to create URL paths
that make sense to a search engine. An example of a search
engine friendly URL would be
"http://www.mydomain.com/articles/
search_engine_optimization/tips_and_tricks.html". Obviously
this type of naming convention is not always possible
depending on how your page is served but it is a good
practice when you can make it happen.

I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map

Always make it easy for search engine crawlers to
navigate your website. Your best bet is to build a site map
page and place a link to the site map on every single page
of your website, usually in the footer. This practice will
ensure that a crawler can easily navigate your website and
catalog every page. If you have never created a site map
before it's as simple as compiling a link list for all the
pages in your website, organizing them into logical sections
and then placing all those organized links on a single page.
If there are pages you don't want to be cataloged by search
engines such as unmanaged blog entries or administration
pages, be sure to exclude them from your link list.

Getting linked

This is without a doubt the hardest optimization to
accomplish, getting other websites to link to your website.
It's even harder to get websites to link to your site using
good anchor naming practices like we discussed in The power
of the link.

So, how do you get other websites to link to your site?
Well, that is kind of a catch 22 situation. You need good
rankings so that your pages can be found and linked by more
websites to improve your rankings. You always have the
option of using services that contact relevant websites in
an effort to get other sites to link to yours but that can
often be cost prohibitive and have less than impressive
results. You can also use link exchange services where your
banner or text links appear on other websites in a random
rotating fashion but this method is too hit and miss with no
significant results for improving rankings or driving
traffic to your website.

Your best bet for getting links of good quality to your
website is to first offer a page that offers suggestions on
how to link to your website page including the actual HTML
script for the anchor link. This will increase your chances
that other sites will provide links to your pages that use
good anchor link text. Second, you should put a "link to our
website" suggestion on every page that you are trying to get
linked. Third, improving traffic through advertising or any
other method that you can think of will go a long way in
getting more links to your site. Lastly and most obvious is
to have relevant quality content.

Now, there is one catch to all of this linking business.
Just because you have more pages linking to your site
doesn't mean that you will always have the best rank. The
results generally factor in not just the number of pages
that link to yours but also the number of unique domains.
That simply means if a competitor website page has 3000
links from 2500 different domains while your website page
has 4500 links from 1200 different domains that the
competitor website will probably receive a higher rank.

But what about ?

There are many other topics to optimization that we have
not covered here. There are even topics within topics in
this article such as XML site maps that we did not have the
space to discuss. In a future article we take on some of the
more advanced topics in search engine optimization in an
effort to cover as many of the good search engine
optimization practices as possible.

SEO is not an exact science

Don't expect your improvements to yield the exact same
results on all search engines. When optimizing your website
you should take more of a blanket approach. Try to improve
your results across the board. Once you see the results that
you are looking for you can then start making tweaks to
improve results even further for your primary target search
engine. Since Google currently handles more searches than
all other search engines combined I would focus my efforts
on Google.

Search engines are also continually redefining how they
rank results and will often make changes without making
public the changes. This makes it extremely difficult to
keep up with trends. I suggest you make it a point to review
search engine optimization trends and factors at least twice
each year to maintain and possibly improve your rankings.
Good luck and happy optimizing!

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